It’s been a whirlwind two years since Sonya Mathieu joined NetApp. Leading the UK & Ireland channel division has placed the industry veteran at the forefront of the firm’s push to secure its position as the leading storage provider in the age of AI.
Having joined during the embryonic stages of the generative AI ‘boom’, the company’s efforts to forge closer ties with partners and deliver success for customers has been a protracted process - but one that’s now paying dividends.
The company unveiled sweeping changes to its channel strategy in 2023, centered firmly around increasing rebate payouts and streamlining distribution agreements.
Relationships with leading - or ‘prestige’ - partners was also a key focus in this pivot in a bid to foster closer alignment on messaging, Mathieu told ITPro.
“It’s been really positive,” Mathieu told ITPro.
“We’ve got six of what we call ‘main managed partners’, which are our prestige partners in the UK, and we pride ourselves on having very close relationships at every level within those organizations to make sure we’re aligning our focus for messaging into what is top of mind for those organizations.”
“That’s been really successful over the last two years,” she added.
Similarly, on the distribution front, the storage giant has made some significant investments, according to Mathieu, largely focusing on muscling in on burgeoning growth areas, such as SAN.
“We've seen some really significant gains over the last year, which is exactly what we wanted to see.”
NetApp capitalizing on SAN
The growing SAN market is an area in which NetApp believes has both huge potential and a domain where it can pry custom from competitors. In the UK, the SAN market is £300 million-plus, Mathieu noted, and while the firm currently commands a 10% share, the plan is to delve further into this space.
“A big focus for us is around what we call ‘secure SAN’. We’ve made some significant advancements around security, and we are the most secure SAN storage vendor in the market,” she said.
Mathieu noted that, among partners leaning into SAN or its storage as a service model, those partners have doubled their business with the company over a two year period, underlining the success of this strategy so far.
Capitalizing on this is a challenge, Mathieu admitted, not least of all due to the confluence of issues affecting customer adoption rates and hardware refresh programs.
“Security is top of mind for all of our partners and our customers,” she said. “If you think about the process that organizations are going through to determine, you know, what hypervisor they want to move forward with, they’re looking at modernizing that infrastructure.”
Dialing in on the security impetus is vital here, Mathieu added. Enterprises embarking on IT modernization programs can ill afford to skimp on this area.
It’s here that NetApp has a “really unique differentiator” by being able to offer anti-ransomware protection, according to Mathieu, and it’s a message that resonates with partners and customers alike when combined with the company’s close integration with major cloud providers.
Safe, guiding hands are critical when enterprises face such high stakes.
“When we are able to lead with the security messaging and our ability to leverage cloud services, we have no competition,” she said. "It just depends on when we get into that battle and that conversation; whether it's at the beginning or the middle or the end, which always can make things a little bit challenging.”
“But there are a number of opportunities where we've been engaged and we've won and were brought in at the last minute because of the way that we challenged our customers to look at the importance around security and our key differentiators.”
Collaboration on AI is vital for NetApp
Generative AI is an unavoidable topic that has seeped its way into both the storage and security domains over the last two and a half years. NetApp has made no secret of its position on the technology, framing itself as a leading storage provider to support innovation in this space.
CEO George Kurian told ITPro in late 2023 that the company’s efforts in driving hybrid cloud adoption would be a key differentiator for customers adopting AI tools, and so far this has proved a highly successful strategy.
With regard to partner collaboration on this front, Mathieu said the company’s two-pronged approach to messaging has been crucial. This centers around highlighting the potential opportunities for partners and customers alike, but also addressing growing concerns over sustainability.
“The market opportunities are there,” she said. “The spend will be there. So it’s about making sure that we are out having conversations and enabling our customers and partners to understand the value that we bring.”
“A lot of these workloads will start in the cloud, you’ll then want to move them back on-prem, and we’re the best data management company to help them do that,” Mathieu added.
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